|Culture War, Real War|
|Written by Peter J. Leithart|
|Monday, 09 November 2009 11:59|
“You reap what you sow” has been a mantra of the culture war. AIDS is the harvest of promiscuity and sodomy; infanticide is the logical outcome of legal abortion; guns and drugs are just what we’d expect in schools that have been systematically scoured of respect for G-d.
On September 13, 2001, Jerry Falwell appeared on the 700 Club, and applied this principle to the attacks of 9/11: “throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.”
That is an impeccably logical analysis from a veteran culture warrior like Falwell. And he was absolutely right. Yet, when the American left claimed that on 9/11, “we got what we deserved,” many American Christians swelled with indignation. Pat Robertson, who initially nodded in vigorous agreement with Falwell about 9/11 (and, like Falwell, later retracted) attacked Democrats back in 2005 with the charge that during war “carping criticism against the commander in chief” amounts to “treason.”
Why the inconsistency? Why are the 9/11 attacks God’s payback to abortionists and not, say, God’s payback for American abuses of power overseas? Apparently, many Christians operate on the assumption that “you reap what you sow” stops at the borders of the
In The Limits of Power, Andrew Bacevich (a
The combination is unsustainable. “Here is the central paradox of our time,” Bacevich writes, “While the defense of American freedom seems to demand that U.S. troops fight in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the exercise of that freedom at home undermines the nation’s capacity to fight. A grand bazaar provides an inadequate basis upon which to erect a vast empire.”
Within weeks of 9/11, President Bush was exhorting Americans to contribute to the war effort not by cutting back, joining the army, or tightening belts, but by jumping on airplanes and taking trips to Disney World. Bacevich notes wryly, “Bush noted with satisfaction that the nation’s annual holiday season spending binge [in 2006] was off to a ‘strong beginning.’ Yet the president summoned Americans to make even greater exertions: ‘I encourage you all to go shopping more.’” A strange alchemy, that: To turn shopping into sacrifice.
One reason we separate foreign and domestic issues is because the
But that doesn’t ease the inconsistency. The military doesn’t decide policy. The people who keep abortion legal, and raise your taxes, and pile bureaucracy upon bureaucracy – those are the people in charge of American foreign policy.
Though Bacevich focuses attention on the links between foreign policy and American materialism and greed, the same logic applies to the typical “culture war” issues. It makes no sense to think that sexually permissive
We can’t have it both ways. Maybe the
That is not a happy thought, because “you reap what you sow” does not observe national boundaries.
|Last Updated on Tuesday, 10 November 2009 10:11|